Funny Once

Stories

By Antonya Nelson

(Bloomsbury; 292 pages; $26)

In the novella "Three Wishes," which closes Antonya Nelson's latest short-story collection, "Funny Once," three siblings haul their father to an old-age home. Literally haul him. The patriarch is not happy about the move, refuses to leave his easy chair, so his children find themselves hoisting him and the chair (or, more precisely, him in the chair) onto the flatbed of a truck. They secure him with duct tape.

Later, as one of the children - 39-year-old Hugh - reflects on the day, he recalls a recent trip to the Salvation Army store with his youngest sister, Holly, where they encountered "a whole section of donated recliners, rows of empty chairs as expressive as a row of human inhabitants, empty laps, indented headrests. Hugh had said, 'Somebody died in every one of these.' "

The question of time - the passage of it, and what we leave behind - hangs over this collection like a storm does on the horizon, leering and full of confidence. In one story, a woman hooks up with her first boyfriend after decades apart and despite both being married. In another, a mother tries desperately to hang on to her teenage boy, knowing full well "he will be leaving me, too. He has already left me."

As in so much of Nelson's work, this theme makes its mark (or indention, if you will) in the home. Regrets, old feuds and memories of those long-gone pop up everywhere. Indeed, the family dramas here are so abundant and dense that at times they can be hard to parse. Family trees in Nelson's stories are not so much trees as rain forests - mucky, entwined, overwhelming. Who exactly is related to whom and exactly how can sometimes take pages to figure out. Relatives regularly sound too much alike, as if there were no way to distinguish them. Hugh and Holly, for instance, have a sister named Hannah. Not to mention a deceased brother Hamish.

And yet it works, brilliantly. While many of the dilemmas presented are old school - What do we do with Dad? - there is a freshness to the stories largely because the families are so thoroughly modern. In one, a woman is woken up by her second husband to inform her that Bernadette, the grown child of her first husband, is on the phone. Her husband (or it is boyfriend?) is drunk again. Can she drop off the kids with her so she can go find him? Needless to say, she is so sorry, but has no one else to call. Her other family is useless.

If the scenario sounds crazy, it is. In its humor and creativity, there is a lot of Flannery O'Connor in Nelson. The characters are often just messes in a mess. They drink. They cheat. They pull out the duct tape. And yet never are they out of reach of the reader. In this respect, Nelson has immaculate control. Just as you're thinking, "These people are wack-jobs," you're also conceding, "Well, you have to secure him somehow."

The contemporary feel of the stories also saves the work from feeling hopeless. While characters often abide by certain types - the perpetual teenage screw-up; the one with six pairs of the same Gap pants; the crier - there is still movement forward. With all the exes, stepchildren and former mother-in-laws, there comes a sense of progression. It's not a particularly celebratory one, but it does serve to remind us that second acts are possible, that humanity will likely trudge forward, slowly, but surely.

In this, Nelson resembles yet another great Southern writer, William Faulkner, who ended his famous appendix to "The Sound and the Fury" with a passage on the fate of the Compson family's black servants, by informing us with reserve, but also some assurance, that "they endured."

Ashley Nelson has written for the Washington Post, the Nation and the Guardian. E-mail: books@sfchronicle.com

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